China

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; Population; Arts and Culture; Economy; Government; History

The Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)

Although the Ming was overthrown by peasant rebellions, the next dynasty to rule China was founded not by a warlord or rebel leader but by the chieftains of the Manchus, a federation of Jurchen tribes. In late Ming times the Jurchens, formerly a nomadic people, had been building up the political and military institutions needed to govern sedentary farming populations. In the 1630s the Jurchen leader Abahai renamed his people the Manchus and proclaimed a new dynasty, the Qing. In 1644, when Chinese rebels reached Beijing, the best Ming troops were deployed elsewhere, at the Great Wall, guarding against invasion by the Manchus. The Ming commander accepted Manchu aid to drive the rebels from the capital. Once this was accomplished, the Manchus refused to leave Beijing, which they made the capital of the Qing dynasty, and soon set about conquering the rest of China.

Like the Mongols, the Manchus were foreign conquerors. However, the Qing dynasty did not represent nearly as fundamental a break with Chinese traditions as did the Yuan dynasty. The Manchus tried to maintain their own identity and traditions but largely left Chinese customs and institutions alone (with the important exception that they forced Chinese men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle, with its shaved front and braid down the back of the head). By the end of the 17th century, the Qing had eliminated all Ming opposition and had put down a rebellion led by Chinese generals in the south. Although Chinese intellectuals who had served the Ming often refused to serve the Manchus, the Qing worked hard to recruit well-respected scholars to the government. The Qing emperor Kangxi, who came to power in 1661, was intrigued by European science and technology, and initially kept on the Jesuits who had served as astronomers under the Ming. However, Kangxi turned against the Jesuits after the Catholic pope ruled that the Jesuits had been wrong to allow Chinese converts to continue to practice ancestral rites.

As rulers of China, the Manchus based their political organization on that of the Ming, although they tightened central control. A new central organ, the Grand Council, conducted the military and political affairs of the state under the direct supervision of the emperor. The chief bureaus in the capital had both a Chinese and a Manchu head. Manchu governor-generals generally supervised Chinese provincial governors.

Prosperity, Population Growth, and Territorial Expansion

In the mid-18th century, during the 60-year reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the Qing dynasty reached the height of its power. The Qing firmly established domestic order, which led to unprecedented peace and prosperity in China. Traditional scholarship and arts flourished, and even in rural areas schools were common and basic literacy relatively high.

External Threats

In the late 18th century the Manchus had grudgingly accepted commercial relations with Britain and other Western countries. Trade was confined to the port of Guangzhou, and foreign merchants were required to conduct trade through a limited number of Chinese merchants. Initially, the balance of trade was in China’s favor, as Britain and other countries paid for huge quantities of tea not with British goods but with money in the form of silver.

The British were intent on expanding trade beyond the restrictive limits imposed at Guangzhou. They also wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the Qing court similar to those that existed between sovereign states in the West. In the 1790s the British sent an ambassadorial mission to China headed by Sir George Macartney, who brought the emperor samples of British goods. The Qianlong Emperor was not impressed with the goods and made no major concessions. The British, for their part, saw that China’s soldiers still used traditional weaponry and thus gained a better sense of China’s military vulnerability.

In order to reverse the balance of trade, British merchants during the 1780s introduced Indian opium, an addictive narcotic drug, to China. Addiction spread, and by 1800 the opium market had mushroomed, shifting the balance of trade in favor of Britain. Trade in opium was illegal in China, but British and other merchants unloaded their cargo offshore, selling it to Chinese smugglers. By the 1830s the threat to China posed by opium had become acute. Opium addiction destroyed peoples’ lives, and the drain of silver was causing fiscal problems for the Qing. Furthermore, many Qing officials, tempted by the profits they could make in the opium trade, became corrupt.

The Qing appointed Lin Zexu in late 1838 and sent him to the city of Guangzhou the following year to put an end to the illegal trade. Lin dealt harshly with Chinese who purchased opium and applied severe pressure to the British trading community in Guangzhou, seizing opium stores and demanding assurances that the British would not bring opium into Chinese waters. In response the British sent an expeditionary force from India with 42 warships and shut down the ports of Ningbo and Tianjin (see Opium Wars). The Qing negotiated with Britain, but the first settlement reached was unsatisfactory to both sides, and the British sent a second, larger expeditionary force. The Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking), concluded at gunpoint in 1842, ceded the Chinese island of Hong Kong, near Guangzhou, to Britain and opened five ports—Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai—to foreign trade and residence. Known as treaty ports, these cities contained large areas called concessions that were leased in perpetuity to foreign powers. Through its clause on extraterritoriality, the treaty stipulated that British subjects in China were answerable only to British law, even in disputes with Chinese. The treaty also had a most-favored-nation clause, which meant that whenever a nation extracted a new privilege from China, that privilege was extended automatically to Britain.

China looked upon the Treaty of Nanjing as an unpleasant but necessary concession dictated by unruly barbarians. Eager to gain more trading privileges, Britain, aided by France, renewed hostilities against China, and during the Second Opium War (1856-1860) applied military pressure to the capital region in North China. In 1857 China was forced by Britain and France to sign the Treaty of Tianjin, which further expanded Western advantages in China. However, the Qing government declined to ratify the treaty, and hostilities resumed. A joint British-French expeditionary force penetrated Beijing, where they burned the Qing’s summer palace in retaliation for Chinese treatment of Western prisoners. With the capital occupied by foreigners, the Qing ratified the treaty in 1860.

Other countries, including Russia, Japan, and the United States, soon demanded similar treaties with China. Militarily weak, the Qing agreed to these treaties, which curtailed China’s sovereignty. In China, the treaties became known collectively as the unequal treaties. By the 1860s there were 14 treaty ports. Because the foreigners had demanded the right to impose their own laws instead of obeying Chinese laws, the concessions, especially those in Shanghai, came to resemble international cities. Foreigners in China sold imported manufactured goods that competed with Chinese products, but the treaties prohibited China from setting tariffs to protect its industries.

Beginning in 1875 the Western powers and Japan began to dismantle the Chinese system of tributary states. Japan brought the Ryukyu Islands under its control in the 1870s, and in the mid-1880s France completed its subjugation of Vietnam, and Britain annexed Burma. In 1860 Russia gained the maritime provinces of northern Manchuria and the areas north of the Amur River. Japanese efforts to remove Korea from Chinese dominance resulted in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895. Japan’s victory was decisive, and China was forced to recognize the independence of Korea, pay an enormous war indemnity, and cede to Japan the island of Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria.

Russia, France, and Germany reacted immediately to the cession of the Liaodong Peninsula, which they regarded as giving Japan a stranglehold on the most economically valuable area of China. They intervened, demanding that Japan return the Liaodong Peninsula in exchange for an increased indemnity from China. In return for their intervention, the Europeans demanded privileges themselves. Russia demanded and received the right to construct railroads across Manchuria, as well as additional exclusive economic rights throughout that region. The Qing granted other exclusive rights to railroad and mineral development to Germany in Shandong Province, France in the southern border provinces, Britain in the Yangtze River provinces, and Japan in the southeastern coastal provinces. Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, and thereafter most of Russia’s rights in southern Manchuria transferred to Japan. The United States, attempting to preserve its trading rights in China without competing for territory, initiated the Open Door Policy in 1899 and 1900. That policy, to which the other foreign powers assented, guaranteed the equal position of the powers with regard to trade with China, as well as the preservation of Chinese territorial integrity.

Internal Threats

Meanwhile, in the 1850s and 1860s, the Qing faced even greater threats from internal rebellions, in particular the Taiping Rebellion begun by Hong Xiuquan. Hong was an ethnic Hakka from Guangdong province in southern China, the area that had suffered the most disruption from the Opium Wars and the opening of new ports. During an illness, Hong had visions of an old man and a middle-aged man who addressed him as “younger brother” and told him to annihilate devils. Later Hong read about Christianity and interpreted his visions to mean that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Hong gathered many Hakka and anti-Manchu followers in southern China and instructed them to give up opium and alcohol and adhere to a strict moral lifestyle. In 1851 Hong proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of the Taiping Tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), and by 1853 the Taipings had moved north and established their capital at Nanjing. By 1860 they were firmly entrenched in the Yangtze Valley and were threatening Shanghai. In 1864 the Qing finally suppressed the Taiping and recaptured Nanjing, but only after the rebellion had spread to 16 provinces and 20 million people had died in the fighting.

Many other rebellions occurred during or after the Taiping. By 1860 the Manchu rulers, ravaged by domestic rebellions and harassed by the Western military powers, knew they had to take drastic action if the empire was to survive. To suppress the rebellions, they turned to Chinese scholar-officials, who raised armies in the provinces. After the rebellions were suppressed, the Manchu rulers turned to the same men, especially Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang, to lead the effort to revitalize the dynasty and modernize the military along Western lines. The Qing officials established arsenals, dockyards (to produce Western weapons and ships), and mines and factories to develop industries. In addition, Chinese envoys went abroad to learn Western diplomatic protocols. These measures drew resistance from conservatives who thought employing Western practices was compounding defeat. Moreover, the results were disappointing. In 1884 and 1885, when China was drawn into a conflict with France over Vietnam, it took only an hour for the French to destroy the warships built at the Fuzhou dockyard.

Fears about foreign intrusion in China provoked a variety of responses among the Chinese. Intellectual leaders and high officials became divided into opposing groups of reformers and conservatives; reformers thought adopting Western science and military technology would strengthen China, while conservatives resisted efforts to copy from the West. The gentry, convinced that the dynasty was on an inevitable downward slide, felt demoralized. Peasants and townspeople protested the foreign intrusions and the changes they caused. Small groups of revolutionaries blamed the Manchu leadership and agitated to have the Manchus overthrown.

By 1898 a group of young reformers, including Kang Yuwei and Liang Qichao, had gained access to the young and open-minded Guangxu Emperor. In the summer of that year, the emperor and Kang instituted a sweeping reform program designed to transform China into a constitutional monarchy and to modernize the economy and the educational system. The program threatened the entrenched power of Empress Dowager Cixi (Guangxu’s aunt and former regent) and the clique of conservative Manchu officials she had appointed. They seized the emperor, and with the aid of loyal military leaders, suppressed the reform movement.

The Chinese peoples’ frustration reached its peak at the turn of the 20th century with the nationalist revolt against foreigners known as the Boxer Uprising. The Yihetuan (Society of Righteousness and Harmony), known by Westerners as the Boxers, were xenophobic, blaming China’s ills on foreigners, especially the Christian missionaries who told the Chinese that their beliefs and practices were wrong and backward. In 1898 the Boxers emerged in impoverished Shandong province in the northwest. As they seized and destroyed the property of foreign missionaries and Chinese converts, the Boxers attracted more and more followers from the margins of society. Small groups of Boxers began to appear in Beijing and Tianjin in June 1900. Western powers protested and prepared for war. The empress dowager at first wavered but then decided to support the Boxers. When a small contingent of foreign troops attempted to secure their interests and citizens in Beijing, Cixi ordered an attack on the foreigners, and a general uprising ensued. After the Boxers laid siege to the foreign concessions in Beijing, a multinational force of 20,000 foreign troops entered China to lift the siege. In the negotiations that followed, China had to accept a staggering indemnity of 450 million ounces of silver, almost twice the government’s annual revenues, to be paid over forty years, with interest.

In 1902 the Manchu court finally adopted a reform program and made plans to establish a limited constitutional government. However, many Chinese thought the reforms were too little, too late. In 1894 anti-Manchu revolutionary Sun Yat-sen began organizing groups committed to the overthrow of the Manchus and the establishment of a republican government. Sun traveled abroad in search of support from overseas Chinese. In 1905 he joined forces with revolutionary Chinese students studying in Japan to form the T’ung-meng Hui (or Tongmeng Hui; Chinese for “Revolutionary Alliance”), which sponsored numerous attempts at uprisings in China.

In October 1911 one of the alliance’s plots finally triggered the collapse of China’s imperial system. A bomb accidentally exploded in the group’s headquarters in Wuchang, and Qing army officers mutinied, fearful that their connections to the revolutionaries would be exposed. Provincial military forces began declaring their independence from the Qing, and by the end of the year most of the provinces in South and Central China had joined the rebellion and sent representatives to the new government. In December the delegates chose Sun Yat-sen as provisional president of a republican government. The Manchus turned to their top general, Yuan Shikai, but Yuan applied only limited military pressure. Yuan ultimately negotiated with the rebel leadership for a position as president of a new republican government in exchange for getting the Qing emperor to abdicate. The revolutionaries consented because Yuan was widely viewed as the only figure powerful enough to ward off foreign aggression. In February 1912 a revolutionary assembly in Nanjing elected Yuan first president of the Republic of China, and China’s long history of monarchy came to an end (see Republican Revolution).

Modern China

The Republic of China

For much of the period from 1912 to 1949, China was a republic in name only. At first, although the government adopted a constitution, Yuan held most of the power. In 1913 the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party), a new political party that brought together the T’ung-meng Hui and other revolutionary groups, attempted to limit Yuan’s power by parliamentary tactics. Yuan dismissed the parliament, outlawed the KMT, and ruled through his personal connections with provincial military leaders. In 1915 Yuan announced plans to restore the monarchy and install himself as emperor, but he was forced by popular opposition to abandon his plans.

This period of political confusion was also one of intense intellectual excitement in China. Modern universities, started in the last years of the Qing, began to produce a new type of Chinese intellectual who was deeply concerned with China’s fate and attracted to Western ideas, ranging from science and democracy to communism and anarchism. Thousands of young people went abroad to study in Japan, Europe, and North America. The journal New Youth, begun in the mid-1910s, called on young people to take up the cause of national salvation. Writers imitated Western forms of poetry and fiction, and started writing in the vernacular rather than the classical language that had formerly marked the educated person. Widely circulated periodicals brought this new language and new ideas to educated people throughout the country. One of the issues most strongly promoted was women’s rights. Such traditional practices as arranged marriage, concubinage, and the binding of girls’ feet to prevent normal growth (tiny feet were considered to enhance women’s beauty) were ridiculed as backward, and young women were encouraged to enroll in China’s many new schools for women.

China enjoyed a respite from Western pressure from 1914 to 1918, when European powers were preoccupied by World War I. Chinese industries expanded, and a few cities, especially Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Hankou (now part of Wuhan), became industrial centers. However, European powers’ preoccupation with the war at home also gave Japan an opportunity to try and gain a position of supremacy in China. In 1915 Japan presented China with the Twenty-one Demands, the terms of which would have reduced China to a virtual Japanese protectorate. Yuan Shikai’s government yielded to a modified version of the demands, agreeing, among other concessions, to the transfer of the German holdings in Shandong to Japan.

After Yuan died in 1916, the central government in Beijing lost most of its power, and for the next decade power devolved to warlords and cliques of warlords. In 1917 China entered World War I on the side of the Allies (which included Britain, France, and the United States) in order to gain a seat at the peace table, hoping for a new chance to halt Japanese ambitions. China expected that the United States, with its Open Door Policy and commitment to the self-determination of all peoples, would offer its support. However, as part of the negotiation process at the peace conference in Versailles, France, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson withdrew U.S. support for China on the Shandong issue. The indignant Chinese delegation refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles.